by Ted Neill
The nurse said that she could not because Tabitha’s mother was now with the Lord.
Tabitha knew what this meant. Her brother that they had buried had gone to be with the Lord. It meant that he would not come back and neither would her mother.
A few months later Mama Seraphina took Harmony to a clinic where they stuck her with a needle and made her bleed. She cried. She realized this was her punishment for what she did with Mr. Thomas. She said she was sorry, but Mama did not seem to care. Mama said that they needed to take her blood to see if she was sick. But Harmony knew she was not sick. She felt fine. There were other sick kids at the home. Some children had even died but Harmony was never sick.
But a few days later Mama called Harmony to her office. Mama’s Bible was open on her desk and she got up and hugged Harmony against her huge body. She was crying. There was a piece of paper in her hand. She said she had been praying that God would help her tell Harmony the news, but that she was still afraid.
She sat down and held Harmony’s hands. Mama told Harmony that she herself had failed Harmony and that God would punish her for it. But God would also punish Mr. Thomas. Harmony asked why. Mama said it was because Harmony had become sick from Mr. Thomas. Harmony said that she felt fine. Mama said it was a sickness, ukimwi, that could take a long time to make you sick. But Mama said that all the children that she had ever known that had ukimwi, had died of it.
Harmony said she did not want to die. She started to cry as well. Mama said she would do her best not to let it happen, but that it meant she had to send Harmony to a special home for children with ukimwi.
Miriam was in the death room so long she lost track of the days. It was certainly months. Although her head hurt and her stomach was always upset, other things got better. Ruth rubbed cream on her skin and it stopped peeling off. She felt like her arms and legs were stronger and she could take herself to the toilet again. When she did go the toilet, she did not have diarrhea any more. Mum Amelia came to visit her and smiled more. So did Bonava, who said he was very delighted she was getting better. She had defied expectations, he said.
Best of all, Miriam could now look at the picture of Jesus and not be afraid. It seemed that for now he had left her alone, left her to live. On Sundays she could hear the children singing in the schoolhouse and she started thinking about the day she would return. She planned to sing very loudly to Jesus because she was grateful to still be alive.
Nurse Ruth often told her how proud she was that Miriam was working so hard at getting better. Oftentimes boys like James, Samson, and Mongai would come and leave pictures for her. Ruth still called them all her boyfriends.
One day the doctor came and finally said Miriam was well enough to go back to her cottage. Miriam felt her heart flutter with the news. Before she went though, the doctor said, they would have to do something about the bumps on her face.
Ruth made Miriam lie down. She put on gloves then began to scrape the bumps away with something plastic. Miriam told her that the bumps would only spread more if she scraped them. That was what Mum Amelia had told her.
“Not anymore,” Ruth said. She crossed the room to where a branch of francha-panya was sitting. It was a flower that grew on the grounds and it looked quite out of place there in the clean nurse’s station. But Ruth broke it open and dripped the sap on Miriam’s face. She said it was a new treatment and that if Miriam was healthy enough it should work.
“Are you sure?” Miriam asked.
“Of course,” Ruth laughed.
But there was something else Miriam had noticed. Her voice sounded different as she spoke. She said so to Ruth.
“Yes, you sound old now. It is from the throat infections.”
“Will it get better?”
Ruth frowned slightly. “You don’t want to sound like a grown-up, Miriam?”
She did not sound like a grown-up, she sounded like a grandmother. But Miriam did not want to be anything like a grown-up. Grown-ups were good at dying. Miriam knew she was good at living. She did not want that to change, but she did not want to offend Ruth either. So she said nothing.
She walked back to the cottage but she did not enter the side where the children were sitting down for dinner. Instead she went to the side where her bed was. This side of the cottage was empty this time of day. She walked into the back, into the bathroom, and stood in front of the mirror.
There was still white cream on her face from the sap and a few Band-Aids where blood had come up under the removed bumps. But her face was not the face she remembered. It was harder now, narrower. It looked the way her voice sounded.
And unmistakably she saw her mother’s face.
She turned away. She did not want to look any longer. She went to the other side of the cottage where the other children were, where her new mother waited.
Chapter 30
Ms. Pricilla
I enter Cottage Yellow one morning to find a well-dressed, attractive woman sitting beside Oliver’s bed. She has brought him a few brand new books and they are talking quietly. The other children keep a respectable distance. Amelia is cleaning, but doing so with a vigor that tells me she is angry.
The woman’s name is Pricilla. She says she was best friends with Oliver’s mother. I have never seen Oliver as happy as he is after her visit. Amelia, on the other hand, is not pleased. I ask her why.
“She said she was best friends with his mother, but then why does she never visit him?” she says. “These relatives and friends of the children always come once in a while, but none of them want to take in a child that has HIV. But they will come and criticize us house mothers, saying that we are not doing a good enough job. Maybe we do not have an education and maybe we cannot afford to dress like her, but it does not mean we do not love these children. It does not mean we cannot be good mothers. I don’t see her taking care of Oliver.”
“But Oliver is happy now. That is all that matters.”
She clicks her tongue at me.
“You wait and see if Ms. Pricilla comes back.”
Weeks pass and turn into months. Pricilla does not return.
Eveline is a Kenyan woman in her late thirties who teaches in the US. One day while becoming especially passionate with her students about their obligations to be aware of injustice and poverty, especially in the developing world, one boy raises his hand and asks her with a candor only children have, “Why are you telling us all this? Is it because you are not doing anything?”
The question was a bomb dropped on Eveline’s life. From that point on she knew she had to go back home to Kenya and do something. She decided on helping orphaned children but how she would finance such an operation was lost on her until she was in the ladies’ room at a wedding reception. With dark skin, sharp cheekbones, braided hair, and erudite glasses, Eveline is a striking mixture of the intellectual and the exotic. An American woman next to her at the wash basin asked her where she was from. Eveline said Kenya, and after a bit of small talk her whole story came tumbling out. The woman, unbeknownst to Eveline, was a wealthy philanthropist. The woman was won over by Eveline’s passion, sincerity, and commitment. A few years later I met her at the opening of Eveline’s dream, Imani (Faith) Homes. It was a beautiful building on a long and narrow lot she inherited from her family. I had given Eveline advice on the design, and knowing her compassion I mentioned a name to her: Nea.
One afternoon, while sitting in the cottage I see Miriam come around the corner with a child leaning on her arm. For a second I think she is disciplining one of the younger children, but her movements are too slow and gentle for that. I suddenly realize the child is Oliver. She is helping him back from the bathroom. He has grown too weak to walk without help.
I know that Mum Amelia always consoles herself when Oliver is sick with his track record of going and returning from the nursing room, but I sense that perhaps this time will be different. After a brief meeting with Bonava one morning, I close my binder and before I leave his office, I ask him about Oli
ver. I tell him I know he has surprised people with his ability to recover before, but I am afraid he might not be able to do it again, that this might be his last trip.
“I am afraid it is,” Bonava says. He has been at the home for over ten years. He has seen this so many times, with so many children, I trust his assessment. “The best we can do now is to give Oliver the best palliative care possible.”
I find myself swallowing hard and excuse myself.
Chapter 31
Superman
When I was little I thought I was Superman. Not pretended— believed. I had a cape I would wear and I remember vividly running and jumping through my yard, launching out in the air waiting to take off and fly.
Only to fall flat on my face.
Where others might have concluded—accurately—from each failure that they were not Superman, I concluded the opposite. After all, for a moment—just a moment—hadn’t I left the ground before I fell? A flight of only seconds seemed about right for my age, my point of development. Give me a couple years, I thought, and I would be able to take to the air for longer flights, eventually soaring to incredible heights and incredible speeds in order to break the sound barrier.
Go deeper. Is it natural childhood development to mix fantasy and reality, or is there more to it?
I’m an only child, so I never had to compete for attention. I was always a little prince. Entitled. Spoiled one might say. Perhaps I never learned that lesson of humility, humbleness, human-ness that siblings provide, that sense of being together, of well-being, even in a crowd. Am I still in adulthood acting out childhood fantasies of saving the world? Am I still playing Superman? To what extent have I internalized and believed in my own unquestioned, unearned privilege?
And deeper. Why would I do such a thing? Well my mother’s cancer of course, at least that was what the fellow patients diagnosed with depression, bi-polar disorder, schizophrenia, and other mental illnesses, told me in group therapy sessions. When I was five, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She survived, but at a cost. She admitted to pulling away from me to focus on her recovery. She stopped hugging me because she felt self-conscious after a mastectomy. For a few years in my most formative stages of development I felt I was left on my own. And so the ego defense rose up. I had to be a good boy—the best possible boy, Superboy—so that my mother would love me again.
So in adulthood, in those group therapy sessions, it’s not about privilege, entitlement, youthful ambition, not even hurts suffered in high school. To my fellow patients, I’m still chasing those same fantasies from early childhood.
“You’re not that different from those orphans you were trying to ‘save,’” Martha, a survivor of two suicide attempts tells me, staring me down across the circle of gathered patients.
So my deepest fear is losing my parents, something I did emotionally at a critical age—a mother no longer available to me. So I revisit my scars by examining the similar wounds of others. I first work with orphaned children with HIV in shelters in DC, which I choose because it seemed difficult but for some reason I feel uniquely qualified for. I can’t go the route of other ordinary people. That would not fit with my concept that I am special. Terminally special. Then I keep using my superpowers for recognition—fitting in with the messages fed to me about being talented, elite, powerful, benevolent. So I sought out more extreme cases: Africa, where the scope of loss was that much larger. Where as a westerner of European descent, another preexisting narrative waits for me, ready-made.It is that of the great white heroes, from missionaries to public health officers, Peace Corps volunteers, and well-intentioned teachers from the West, conquering disease, ignorance, and darkness. Africa, place of myths and willing misunderstanding. Not India, not Brazil, but Africa, the dark continent. There are African countries, Ghana, Zambia, South Africa, Kenya, where millions of people live and die in ordinary lives, making friends, lovers, mortgage payments. Then there is AFRICA, that projection of western European fantasy. I was going to the latter as much as the former.
What better place to be Superman, a great white knight?
So that is why I—we—do it perhaps. Me, Jason Russell, Greg Mortenson? I heard it said that aid workers, journalists, activists, are always running from something, whether a breakup or a breakdown. Maybe I was running into mine, small difference. That would fit a hackneyed, well-worn narrative.
I see others who come there. I see myself in them, zero to hero. Average folks who would be forgettable back home are suddenly celebrities in a country where most people have considerably less earning power. Men will speak to you with deference, women will chase you. All the while you are drunk with power and the admiration of people back home who think you are living the hero’s journey.
What they don’t see are the folks who can’t go back home. No longer acculturated to home. Too used to being first. Too used to being a big fish in a small pond. And maybe, just maybe too in love with the beauty and brutality of the place. Some of the two-year-wonders can’t go home to the comfy suburbs and mini-malls, can’t leave the adventures behind. When you have watched the moon rise over the Rift Valley, or a herd of wildebeest marching into a river, or smelled the earth after it rains on the savannah; when you have saved a child from certain death, you feel alive. And so with acknowledge-ment to Mr. Wainaina, Africa is very intoxicating to us foreigners. Maybe we see this in a way the resident cannot, just as it took a Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, to see the nuances of America that the residents were blind to.
But Wainaina’s point is more complex and I see that now. The foreign visitor as writer—as a bridge character—trope exists thanks to the inequalities of privilege that allow one young, white person to visit Africa after another. To “find or lose himself”—as Teju Cole points out in his brilliant essay in the Atlantic: The White-Savior Industrial Complex; to publish another book (like this one), and debut another film about it (like Kony 2012) then return comfortably to his life of privilege. I’m the first to admit we’re all too often caught up in the sentimentality of it to wonder why more Africans can’t move to the US or Europe and enjoy the same privileges, to be mistaken for saviors, to be viewed as celebrities.
So I went. I did all the things I did and I was happy, falling into the same traps of sentimentality and privilege, and white savior tropes that valid critics deride.
But the idealist in me still thinks of a story Father McLeod once told me. It was about a man walking along the seashore after a storm. The storm had washed hundreds of thousands of starfish up onto the beach where they would be dried, shriveled, and killed by the sun. While the man was walking along the beach he encountered a boy who was picking up the starfish and tossing them back into the water to save them. The man, looking at the innumerable starfish on the sand, said to the boy, “What are you doing? You can’t save all of them, what you are trying to do does not matter.”
The boy bent down, picked up another starfish, which he threw back into the sea, saying to the man, “It matters to that one.”
So I think what I did mattered to Miriam, Josephine, Tabitha, Jamina, Winnie, Ivy, and the girls/gremlins I read to at night. I mattered to Oliver who had a friend to play chess with and bring him books.
Sentimental, yes. But in the moment, I don’t know if the children would have asked me not to be there.
None of it is something I can easily resolve.
And I still left. Like every other Two-Year-Great-White-Knight-Wonder. Perhaps my depression and anxiety, came about from not being able to reconcile it all and guilt for having fallen into the same old tired roles. Ultimately, my psychic injury derived from this inability to reconcile narratives: I am Superman, but I saved so few. I loved Kenya, but I left. I am a savior but really I am just human. More than that, I’m a participant in a system that contributes to over simplification of complex social issues and the infantilizing of people. Was I “building capacity” or undermining agency? What of faith? I believe in God but he kills children and I hate him. W
ho are the “good guys” if everyone is guilty?
As Dr. Weena said, the world is not a good or bad place, it’s just a place.
And all too complicated for me to figure out with my cultural biases, my privilege-induced blind spots, and my woefully inadequate superpowers of intellect and writing. For each time I try, I only see my own flaws, my own insecurities, my own neediness. I feel utterly incapable of reformulating an identity in all this confusion.
But did that matter to Miriam or Oliver?
And still nothing ever computed because the admiration, the appreciation, never amounted to the things I needed/wanted. So at thirty-five I was still stuck with little savings, no job, and a return to school staring me down. Grandiose choices left me without material comforts. I am a kid still trying to play Superman who has not realized he is Clark Kent, and only Clark Kent.
At other times I try to nurture a less critical reading of myself. Could I see myself as just a well-meaning white kid, lucky, affluent, loved, sensitive, moved by the suffering of others, raised with humanistic values, who wanted to give back, who loves to travel, and the variety and exoticism, the mind broadening experience it brings? Can I credit myself, without being arrogant, as being a young man who tries to see people as people, not as projections or stereotypes, who threw himself into the face of the fire in hopes of finding wisdom or maturity? All at once, I can see that I am and always have been naïve, sentimental, ambitious, grandiose, privileged, over confident, insensitive, and compassionate.
But it inevitably brings me back to the same conclusion: I have struggled to accept the painful lesson that the world is not fair, that in reality bad things happen to those who don’t deserve them and there seems to be no adequate explanation for it.